Deputy Tony Miller had been patrolling one of the nation’s busiest light rail lines for less than a week when a man walked onto the tracks and got smacked by a train.

He rushed to the scene to find the man dead on the ground with his back to the car, his earphones still blasting music. For the first time in his career, the Los Angeles County sheriff’s deputy had to notify a victim’s family about a death.

Responding to accidents on the track, though, has become a regular part of patrolling the 22-mile Blue Line.

Since opening in 1990, the line has been linked to 101 fatalities – 23 of them suicides – and 875 collisions involving trains clashing with motorists and pedestrians as they pass through some of the densest and poorest neighborhoods in the region.

The numbers are the highest among the Metropolitan Transportation Authority’s five rail lines and have prompted the agency over the years to install more cameras, safety gates and other warning devices.

The upgrades have drawn mixed results and haven’t placated critics of the agency.

“Their attitude is we own the (track), whoever gets in the way is at fault and they’re paying the price,” said Najmedin Meshkati, a USC engineering professor who has studied safety at railroad crossings. “This mentality doesn’t work.”

The Blue Line gets a bad rap compared with the other rail lines in the MTA system, but agency officials said the number of accidents have to do with its unique features.

The line travels mostly at street level through 103 crossings, shuttling close to 75,000 passengers on an average weekday. Trains trundle close to an unruly mix of stray animals and people living and working near the track – people who are the most dependent on mass transit.

During the peak commute hours, trains come as frequently as once every five minutes.

“The more grade crossings you have, the greater the potential for accident,” said Vijay Khawani, director of corporate safety at the MTA. In comparison, the other rail lines go through tunnels or skyways or a combination of the two with some street-level crossings.

When the Blue Line was approaching its 20th anniversary over the summer and had reached its 99th fatality, the agency posted a series of online blog entries addressing the problem.

While federal statistics show the MTA’s death rate is on par with other transit agencies in the country that operate light rail lines, the MTA said it’s trying to reduce the fatalities.

Over the years the agency has installed cameras at intersections to discourage motorists from running red lights, improved signage and installed more gates to block people from illegally crossing the tracks to beat the train.

The measures have led to a drop in collisions between vehicles and trains, yet accidents involving pedestrians persist.

Earlier this month, a man walked in front of a moving train and died. A friend told coroner’s investigators that he had problems seeing and hearing.

A Long Beach woman who has ridden the Blue Line for the last two decades said the worst accident she witnessed was in January 2009, when a blind man fell down a platform and was fatally struck by a train.

“Oh my Lord, that was terrible,” Jerri Martin said. “But for the most part, I think the line is safe. There are warning signs everywhere, but there’ll always be one or two in the bunch who don’t obey the rules.”

The MTA said it has stepped up enforcement by occasionally launching crackdowns, resulting in hundreds of citations in just a few hours. Khawani said the agency has also gone to schools and community centers to teach children and adults about the dangers around the Blue Line. Yet despite all the efforts he said he stills sees brazen behavior around the track.

On a recent patrol, Miller pointed out numerous examples of passengers opening gates to cross the track even when red lights were flashing in front of them and bells were ringing from the approaching train. Authorities said walkers commonly misjudge the train’s speed, or get so focused on a train coming from one direction they’ll forget to check the other direction before crossing the tracks.

Miller stopped one young man wearing headphones as he jaywalked across the street, jumped the track and climbed onto a train platform, oblivious to the deputy shouting at him. Miller said he has caught many repeat offenders and come to know them on a first-name basis.

“They usually say, `I’m late for work, please can I go?’ We try to work with everyone, make them understand that we’re not issuing tickets to meet some kind of quota,” Miller said. “It’s about safety.”

He said the outreach effort has helped, and he’s issued fewer tickets than when he started in 2008.

MTA Chief Executive Art Leahy said the agency has met and exceeded safety requirements, and that it has openly discussed steps made to improve safety.

“We’ve done more than any system in the nation has done,” Leahy said.

He said the agency plans to spend $1 million next year to install more swing gates to slow down people who try to run across the track, including at the crossing where the visually impaired man was killed.

He said the agency was also considering installing inward-

facing cameras to monitor train operators. In July, two Blue Line operators struck a police cruiser and an MTA bus in separate accidents that resulted in several injuries. The agency said it hasn’t determined why the operators failed to stop.

Meshkati, the USC professor, criticized the MTA for taking a “piecemeal approach” to improving safety by making incremental changes to the line. He said the agency needs to overhaul its safety culture and provide more thorough accident investigation reports to the public.

Meshkati said federal regulators should have direct safety oversight over transit agencies, contending that state regulators can’t adequately do the job.

A pending bill being pushed by the Federal Transit Authority proposes to set comprehensive safety guidelines for transit agencies, and provide funding to improve the effectiveness of state safety oversight agencies.

“If we want to continue advancing transit in this country, we need to ensure that the riders’ safety is everyone’s top priority,” FTA Administrator Peter Rogoff said.

Khawani said the MTA has gone beyond some agencies in introducing warning devices, but he said adding too many bells and whistles can confuse people.

“At some point, we’ve done it all,” he said. “It’s time for the public to pay attention.”

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